'Watch Dogs' Review (PS4): New Dog, New Tricks

It’s a tough situation for developers. You want your fans to think you’re bringing them the moon with a new game, but with those sorts of lofty promises, you sometimes oversell your own product. When played in a vacuum, Watch Dogs is a very good sandbox game. But as it exists in this world where it’s meant to be an earth-shattering original IP and the birth of a new uber-franchise, it comes up short in many noticeable areas. It can often feel more derivative than innovative, despite its array of new hacking toys, and may disappoint some expecting more than it delivers.

Watch Dogs takes us to near-future Chicago, where the only real technological advancement appears to be the fact that every electronic device known to man can now be hacked with a press of a button on a smart phone, thanks to a new city-wide operating system, ctOS. As such, this development has given rise to a legion of superhackers like our lead, Aiden Pearce.

We don’t know much about Aiden, and still don’t by the end of the game. When we meet him, he’s lead hacker in an electronic heist gone wrong, and soon we’re flashed into the future 11 months where his niece has been accidentally killed by those seeking revenge for the botched job. Now he’s turned the tables and is after their heads.

Not content with fighting his own demons, Aiden also uses his technical prowess to become something like a pre-cog out of Minority Report, using data analytics to predict crimes before they happen. The city is already calling him “the vigilante” and Aiden spends the course of the game hacking into the hearts and minds of Chicago by cleaning up the streets. By the end you’ll be a beloved hero or feared murderer, though the game fails to clearly state what effect the minimalistic karma system actually has on gameplay. Mercifully, there are no “good and evil” branching skill trees to be found.

Aiden’s life is thrown for a loop yet again when his old partner resurfaces to threaten his still-grieving family. In order to ensure their safety, Aiden is at his partner’s beck and call, doing everything from sneaky cybersleuthing to murdering hundreds of people with automatic weapons. In the process, he starts to unravel a vast conspiracy uniting Chicago’s mob presence, Southside street gangs and power-hungry megacorporations in one huge grand scheme to do…something. It will take the entire game to figure out what, and there are scarce few clues along the way.

The first thing you’ll discover about Watch Dogs is that it’s going to be far more like Grand Theft Auto than you were probably anticipating. It’s being sold as a game based around hacking and subterfuge, but in practice, nearly every other mission devolves into massive shootouts behind chest-high walls.

Hacking has not completely reinvented the sandbox crime game here, it’s simply seasoned it. Sometimes quite nicely, but other times its touch is so light you’ll barely notice it.

At this point it has to be said that if you’re one of those people who hates when TV shows or movies use “hacking” as a deus ex machina for pivotal plot points, turn around and run as far away from Watch Dogs as you can. The hacking in the game makes almost no earthly amount of sense, is full of genre clichés, and the plot is stuffed with so much nonsense technical mumbo jumbo, you’ll be bleeding it out of your eyeballs by the end.

With that said, players should be perfectly willing to ignore all of that if the central mechanic of “hack everything” makes for a fun play experience. And it does, much of the time.

The hacking mechanic is used in three primary ways. Open combat, car chases, and puzzles. The last item will remind many of Assassin’s Creed’s climbing challenges that were as simple as working your way up an eagle eye tower, or hopping around some giant historical landmark. Aiden will often be tasked with hopping through security camera feeds, invading door lock overrides and downloading whatever needs to be stolen for the data gods to rejoice. It’s not exactly a barrel of laughs, but it breaks up the action and can be genuinely challenging at times. I will say that I wish they’d come up with a less played out “in the system” hacking mechanic than the famous “connecting tubes” school of hacking, as that seems to be the only way video games know how to represent it. Considering the entire game is based on the concept, a little variety and creativity would have gone a long way there.

Hacking can also be used on the fly, namely during the endless amount of car chases you’ll find yourself in as you either have to flee the cops or gangs, or hunt someone down yourself. This is where things split pretty heavily from games like GTA and Saints Row. There is no drive-by mechanic, so you can’t just empty an Uzi into a rival car’s engine block as a method of problem solving.

Rather, you have to rely on the city of Chicago itself to be your guardian. As you fly through the city, you can hack street lights, divider rods, spike strips and even gas mains to cause your enemies to total their cars. It takes some patience getting used to this system, and it can be frustrating early on. Trying to ram your way out of trouble or simply outrun pursuers just isn’t an option. Realistically, the only way you can beat these sections is by hacking, and some of the events can be tough to time correctly. Early in the game, it’s borderline impossible to beat a few of the chase sequences and side-missions with a meager hacking skill tree, and it can be irritating to try and get the timing and strategy down. Eventually, you’ll learn how to use the game’s slow motion mechanic (pressing R3) to pinpoint the timing for proper takedowns, and it’s exhilarating to watch a pursuing SUV get pancaked by a semi-truck because you flipped the light at the right moment.

This is where the Watch Dogs’ central concept shines. I love the fact that this is the only way out of these situations, as it forces players to make use of the game’s primary mechanic, and damn well near master it by the time they reach the insanely tough missions near the end of the game.

If only I could say the same for open combat.

On foot, Watch Dogs is a strange game, unsure of its own identity. It tries to let you use your various hacking skills (overloading fuse boxes, blowing up steam valves, disrupting enemy comms), to try and take on combat situations as creatively as possible. When you get through a section using only environmental weapons and baton takedowns, it’s a gratifying feeling.

But there’s this whole other half of the game that simply allows you do absolutely everything you can in Grand Theft Auto. Aiden has full access to every kind of gun known to man, from heavy pistols to rapid fire SMGs from .50 caliber snipers to 75-round magazine Light Machine Guns. As such, a typical mission usually starts with you trying to be stealthy using beatdowns and maybe a silenced pistol. But inevitably one of the 50 enemies in the area will spot you, and you’ll end up chewing through everyone else with an LMG, mashing the “hack” button in the hope that it happens to blow something up. There is no quicksave option, so if you’re deep into a mission using stealth and your cover is blown, it’s the logical decision to fight your way out with brute force rather than start over at the very beginning of the section.

It’s unfortunate that the same principles applied to driving and car chases couldn’t be used in open combat. The options are there for creative gameplay to be sure, but there is almost never anything as effective as a machine gun burst to an enemy’s chest. There’s no real penalty for choosing to play this way, nor are there any rewards for keeping things quiet. Occasionally the game will force you to sneak through an area and dispatch enemies while remaining unseen, but those missions are rare (and the most fun sections, I might add).

In the end, for many missions Watch Dogs feels very, very close to Grand Theft Auto or even Uncharted’s style of combat. That’s all well and good because both of those are great games, but I think many will be surprised that Watch Dogs went this loud and proud with its gunplay. I’m not saying the entire game should have been Aiden typing on his iPhone, ordering household appliances to kill his enemies, but in a game based on covert ops, subterfuge and all-around sneakiness, did the lead hacker hero really need to pull an Arnold Schwarzenegger-sized machine gun out of his trenchcoat to mow down a courtyard full of gang bangers?

You can argue that it’s the players choice whether or not they want to go that route, but for me, given the fact that the hero is a guy whose main weapon is supposed to be a cell phone, it doesn’t jive with the core concept of the game. It makes Watch Dogs seem off-key tonally, and that translates into the story as well. I would be willing to fully embrace a game that was “GTA with hacking” should the central story prove interesting. But the well-executed (if not frequently misguided) gameplay dramatically outshines the plot and the characters.

The central problem stems from Aiden Pearce, hat-wearing white guy, as the hero. As this is a new IP introducing a new lead character, it would actually help to…you know, introduce him. But both at the beginning of the game, and at the end, we know next to nothing about the man. We know the defining moments which spurred the events of the game, the botched job and the dead niece (seen a thousand different flashbacks), but past that? Nothing.

Why is Aiden some sort of uber hacker? Better yet, why is he also an extremely proficient gun-wielding maniac? I would understand if uncovering his past was a central part of the game, but past one or two tiny, tiny clues dropped throughout (my rival in a drinking contest mini-game said it looked like I’d served in the military), there’s nothing to be found.

Now, in a game with literally 40,000 secrets hidden throughout the map, it’s entirely possible I just haven’t found the right audio log or email thread explaining Aiden Pearce’s past, but it’s certainly not a part of the central story at all. Sometimes it works to have a new character appear without any explanation of his existence, but with Aiden, it just makes him feel dull and implausible.

He’s not helped by his main supporting cast member either. That would be Clara, the hot, tattooed, pierced hacker chick that exists because well, we weren’t going to get through a hacking game without a hot, tattooed, pierced hacker chick now were we? She has some sort of European accent, but for as dynamic and interesting a character as The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo’s Lisbeth Salander is, Clara is equally as flat and has the most stilted, listless dialogue in the game.

I quite liked a few other characters in the game, particularly the ancient mafia don, Mr. Quinn, thug hacker, Iraq, and Aiden’s “fixer” buddy, Jordi. But it’s strange to me that these three are much stronger characters than the central pair. I think a lot has to do the with voice acting, which is better for these three, but rather poor for the two heroes and their arch villain, Aiden’s old partner. It really is a strange feeling to recently play through Wolfenstein: The New Order and feel more attached to the cast of that goofy game than I did with the crew of Watch Dogs.

The story has promise, but it only lives up to its potential occasionally. The best bit of the game is a quest line which has Aiden impersonating a man attending a live auction for girls being sold into sex slavery. You walk around the shadowy room as the “merchandise” is paraded around stage like prize livestock. You hack into bidder’s phones where you can read their creepy texts about their plans for their purchased women. It’s chilling, dark and really shows that this could have made for a great noir tale.

But the rest of the game isn’t like that. It’s perfectly fantastic that Watch Dogs doesn’t need GTA or Saint’s Row’s winking, goofy humor, but it’s just not interesting enough outside of a few rare moments for the story to work dramatically. Shady organizations are doing something shady, and that’s about as compelling as it gets. Aiden’s family is in danger for 90% of the game, and that’s literally his entire reason for being. The more interesting question, why he’s this crazy, badass hacker vigilante in the first place, never even comes close to being answered. The tone is all wrong. The game wants to be a dark hacker punk tale and is just a relatively brainless “you stole my woman” summer blockbuster. Even the music feels wrong, and is weirdly off-putting in an age when video game scores often rival those found in films. Pay attention not to the radio songs, but to what’s playing during chase or combat scenes, and you’ll see what I mean.

Though the story is bland and combat veers a bit too close to GTA for my liking, it’s hard to ignore the polish of the game, both mechanically and visually. Chicago was a very neat place to set a title like this, and though it’s not the lush blue and green of Assassin’s Creed IV’s Caribbean vistas, it’s not bad either. It’s certainly not what we saw in the E3 demos, but it’s definitely one of the better looking new-gen consoles games I’ve played. The only assets that are noticeably lackluster are Ubisoft’s aging character models. While most big name studios are now using precise facial motion capture, Ubisoft’s heroes are missing expressive emotion and realistic nuance, which only amplifies the problematic voice acting.

In terms of pure “feel,” however, this may be one of the best games in the sandbox genre. For as great as Grand Theft Auto games are, they always have their fair share of mechanical issues. Either it’s cars that feel like boats, or shooting that snaps your barrel to targets so fast it makes firefights entirely unfair. I’m very impressed with how good driving feels in Watch Dogs (motorcycles being my favorite, as they control great and you get to watch Aiden’s trenchcoat flap in the wind), and combined with the fun on-the-fly hacking mechanics, it’s the best part of the game. The cover system is a little wonky as you might find yourself climbing over a wall instead of hiding behind it sometimes, but shooting feels balanced for a third person shooter. There’s enough autoaim to be helpful, but not so much that it feels cheap. Even if I dislike the fact that the game had to use machine gun cover combat, I can’t deny that it does it well.

Similarly, Ubisoft has done a great job worldbuilding here. As you may have read before release, there are something like 40 different types of minigames and sub-missions in Watch Dogs, and it’s an OCD completionist’s dream (or nightmare, depending on how you want to look at it). While the main story will maybe take you 10-12 hours, I can’t even imagine how long it would take to 100% the game. Forty, sixty, eighty hours maybe?

There are sub-missions which have you being your pre-cog vigilante self, predicting crimes before they happen. It might be catching a murderer on foot after witnessing him commit a crime, crashing a criminal’s car after a chase, taking down an entire mob convoy, or racing stolen cars. These are all pretty fun, and come with some solid unlocks if you do enough of them. Moreover, even within each category of the missions there’s a fair bit of diversity in terms of structure, which means you can do a dozen or so of each type without them feeling dull. I actually found a few to be harder than any story mission from the entirety of the campaign.

Then come the minigames, which are almost too numerous to even list here. There are activities you’ll know from real-life, including drinking games, the shell game, poker and even chess, but there are a few rather out-there ones as well, like a collection of VR games that seem like they’re taken straight out of Saints Row’s insane universe. As they’re meant to be video games, I’ll give them a pass for breaking tone, however. Some are fun, but others go on too long. During many of these, even on my first attempt, I found myself making it through 15 to 20 rounds of VR shooters or racing tracks, before quitting out of exhaustion. I’m sure getting a true high score is tough, but no minigame should let me play for 20 full minutes without posing any kind of challenge.

These minigames and sub-missions are how multiplayer is implemented into the game as well. Rather than having an entirely separate online mode, Watch Dogs will randomly throw other hackers into your game as “fixers,” trying to ruin your day. You’ll square off in races, fights or hacking challenges against them, and sometimes they literally force you to stop whatever you’re doing and deal with an intrusion. It’s sort of annoying when you’re on your way to a story quest, but admittedly a concept in keeping with the theme of the game. My interactions with other players were limited in the review period this weekend, so I’m still not sure how every aspect of the matching/insertion system works, but it is a cool way to integrate multiplayer without it feeling tacked on or overbearing.

Outside of these kinds of activities, there are also a slew of puzzles to be solved involving lining up QR codes to scan through security cameras, or finding out how to open locked doors of garages containing stolen merchandise. And of course, there’s the eternal minigame of simply walking around with your phone, reading about every single pedestrian’s life. Your data app will show you their name, income and a line summing up their entire existence like “collects comic books” or “frequently searches for ‘rape’ online.” Now I understand why Aiden can predict crimes…

Your main source of income will be electronically pickpocketing these pedestrians, and whales can land you $10,000-$15,000 for a half-second hack. Funds can be used to buy cars that can be delivered to you remotely. It’s a useful feature in a game where if you carjack someone, they’ll actually call the cops, and trust me when I say it is not worth the hassle to try and escape the fuzz if you don’t have to.

You also buy weapons, but the system is a bit wonky as the only thing worth doing is saving up for the five-star gun in each class, and never touching any of the others. And if you can find one in the wild from a corpse, you don’t even have to do that. Also, I can’t remember ever being below 80% ammo with any gun, even after heated firefights. Ammo limits are important as they force you to use other weapons rather than rely on one ‘old faithful,’ but with this system, you’ll probably just pick your favorite gun never need to part with it under any circumstance.

Watch Dogs is so massive in scope even after beating the campaign I know I’ve only scratched the surface of all the secrets and easter eggs it contains. In your exploration, you might even discover the game’s weird, hidden sense of humor, like when I hacked into a private camera feed and remotely stole $4,000 from actress and Ubisoft press conference host Aisha Tyler as she chatted on the phone.

Watch Dogs is a very, very well made game. It’s just not as interesting or fresh as I hoped it would be. While I love the hacking elements that have been included in the game, they lack a coherent story and well-developed characters to use them. And it feels like Ubisoft didn’t want to stretch players too far outside their comfort zones, and decided to cram in the option for bunch of loud and crazy gunplay that doesn’t fit with the central premise of the game. If the game had taken a risk and just given players a silenced pistol and a stun baton, I probably would have been even more impressed than I am with its dump truck full of automatic weapons.

I think many fans were hoping Watch Dogs would create both an interesting new IP universe, and shake up the concept of a sandbox game. In the end, it doesn’t quite do either. The characters are so uninteresting they’re almost unsalvageable, and though gameplay is polished to a mirror shine, it just doesn’t do enough to stand out in the genre, despite the flavor hacking adds to traditional missions and exploration.

Like Grand Theft Auto V before it, sometimes it’s not enough to simply be big and well-made. Watch Dogs feels like a collection of promising concepts with nothing solid holding them together. Aiden Pearce should have been that something, but instead, he’s just a character meant to sell cool looking hats in collector’s editions. Perhaps that can be rectified in a sequel, but for now, Pearce is pretty big issue, and so is his propensity to kill people in boring, cover-based shooter-y ways.

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The way you describe the main missions as devolving into gunfights most of the time sounds like the disappointment cherry on top of a massive layer cake of all the other issues surrounding the game’s development. It just seems insane that Ubisoft couldn’t have come up with some sort of main mission structure that favored stealth, sabotage and the like all the way through when they use hacking, often seen in pop culture as a subtle act, as the core gameplay mechanic. This could have led up to rare moments where you -do- get to go guns-blazing and feel awesome.

I’m going to have to look up a bunch of gameplay videos on YouTube to see these wasted-potential missions in action. If I ever do buy Watch Dogs, it will either be years down the line in a used “Game of the Year” copy with all the 9 bajillion pieces of DLC intact, or it will be if Ubisoft Montreal can create a sequel that actually lives up to what is advertised.

To get a little more serious though, I’m more disheartened by the fact that the central story only lasts 10-12 hours. That’s simply unacceptable in games anymore. People complained about Titanfall not having a campaign, but multiplayer is at least a theoretically infinite experience, making a $60 investment totally worthwhile. When you have a game that’s supposed to be based around a single player, story-driven experience, set in a massive open-world environment, and the best you can pull is 12 hours of material, there is something seriously wrong. Games for the original Playstation had significantly longer campaigns than modern games, even when you factor in time spent grinding in preparation for the final bosses, and those were roughly the same price as modern games, and were developed in roughly the same amount of time.

The simple solution here would have been to have more of the mini-games and side-quests be incorporated into the story. Oblivion used a similar mechanic quite well in balancing out the gameplay in some of the faction storylines, like how you had to go steal goods and fence enough of them to reach a revenue goal before the next mission would unlock. This is a far better option than short-story campagin, followed by three times as much random content that you likely get no reward for completing. Something similar to Oblivion’s progression blocks could be used here, just to make the timeline of events feel more realistic. Yes, Aiden may be an amazing hacker, but as he continues to close down his syndicate, there still has to be time taken to plan out his next move. Incorporate side missions and mini-games here to flesh out his own back story or build attachment towards supporting characters, and suddenly you have a game with a compelling story where you’re emotionally invested in the outcomes of the characters.

But maybe I’m wrong. Perhaps Ubisoft’s goal now is to make excessively short games where the hero is some generic douche bag you end up feeling indifferent towards or absolutely hating. I was glad when I finished Assassin’s Creed IV, not because it was a good game full of memorable moments (the gameplay was what kept me holding on to the end), but because I hated every character in the game, save Anne Bonny and Blackbeard. Seriously though, Ubisoft needs to learn how to develop characters. Jason Brody of Far Cry 3 is the most compelling protagonist they’ve had in years.

yes, but length shouldn’t be used as a metric for the value of a game, as everybody’s level of skill isn’t the same and it’s not easy to come up with an average playtime necessarily. I find that when a review calls out a time, my personal time ends up being 1.5-2x longer b/c I take my time instead of trying to gun through it in one weekend (unless it absolutely happens to be that addictive to play).

“It’s unfortunate that the same principles applied to driving and car chases couldn’t be used in open combat. The options are there for creative gameplay to be sure, but there is almost never anything as effective as a machine gun burst to an enemy’s chest. ”

I think this is likely b/c Ubisoft recognizes that they didn’t want to throw themselves into direct competition with Splinter Cell or anything in the MGS universe, both games of which are kind of considered to be the current leaders of that genre. Stealth is not an easy beast to implement in games necessarily, and it’s certainly not what alot gamers look forward to. Perhaps Ubi then decided to focus on the multitude of content as opposed to stealth and story. Still…mid-mission checkpoints are a must for any game including stealth as a gameplay element, it’s too bad they weren’t included to make it a bit more of an option for those looking to go that route.

First of all, the whole “devolve” into gun battles thing only happens if you play on a difficulty less than the hardest difficulty. On the hardest difficulty, gunfights are an easy way to get yourself killed, and it’s much more effective to kill all the enemies using “hacking” techniques, and the only perhaps when there’s one or two left, whipping out the gun.

Also, enemies call for back-up, so sneakiness is preferred to gunfights, because with gunfights, you quickly find yourself in a futile battle, as a few well placed shots are all it takes to kill you on the hardest difficulty.

Is the game GTAish? Sure! Any open world game where you can steal cars and freely roam a city will ALWAYS feel like GTA, no matter how many new mechanics are added to the game.

Overall, the game is great so far, and the hacking mechanics are an integral part of the game, both during car chases and on foot. So far, I’ve had a case with 9 enemies, and I was able to get rid of 7 of them without firing a single shot, and yes, it was completely necessary and not just an obstacle I placed for myself to see if I could.

After so much hyperbole for the next generation, I’m just disappointed in general and I won’t be buying any more games until Destiny. I already have Infamous Second Son, why do I need another GTAV clone?

Good review, i want to play watch dogs. Thanks for showing new tricks for my ps4 These people are using all low poly model to improve qualities. Just i want to know what game engine is used to develop the game.